Stop emailing and start talking, Ferrari orders employees

New directive limits emails to three recipients

Ferrari, usually in the news for its fast cars and Formual 1 racing teams, made headlines this week because of a new company policy that limits the number of group emails its employees can send to three. (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

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Italian sports car maker Ferrari set the internet abuzz this week after it issued a directive to its employees to cut down the number of group emails they send and talk to their co-workers instead.

"From now on, each Ferrari employee will only be able to send the same email to three people in-house," a statement on the company's website said.

Employees of large companies are all too familiar with the phenomenon of the mass email and spend a good portion of their workday deleting these inbox hogs — or, in the case of the latest Harlem Shake video and other popular internet memes, circulating them even more widely. But few companies have gone as far as Ferrari in their effort to stamp out this 21st-century scourge.

"The injudicious sending of emails with dozens of recipients often on subjects with no relevance to most of the latter is one of the main causes of time wastage and inefficiency in the average working day in business," said the statement explaining Ferrari's new email policy.

The way to tackle the problem, the Italian car maker told employees, is simple: "talk to each other more and write less."